Apartheid protest

In the article by Conor Cruise O'Brien that Roy Foster terms "thoughtful" (Letters, 4 August), the Irish writer denounced the ANC as "a political movement whose sanction, symbol and signature is the burning alive of people in the street". He described apartheid-enforcing Afrikaners as "ordinary human beings", and added: "I suspect that some of the righteous who denounce them from afar might behave quite like them if they were caught in a similar predicament – if, for example, there had been a black majority in America in the 1950s." Elsewhere, O' Brien justified the Israeli occupation of Arab territories. However, none of these assertions amount to a defence of apartheid and I regret misrepresenting a writer whose early work I mostly admire. There is a detail missing from Foster's account of O'Brien's boycott-busting trip to South Africa in 1986. Students disrupted his lectures, which included a panegyric to settler zionism, forcing their cancellation. An inquiry commission appointed by the University of Cape Town blamed O'Brien's "volatile personality" for the fiasco.Pankaj MishraLondon